Emotion Hacking VR: Amplifying Scary VR Experience by Accelerating Actual Heart Rate

An emotion hacking virtual reality (EH-VR) system is an interactive system that hacks one’s heartbeat and controls it to accelerate a scary VR experience. The EH-VR system provides vibrotactile biofeedback, which resembles a heartbeat, from the footrest. The system determines a false heartbeat frequency by detecting the user’s heart rate in real time. The calculated false heart rate is higher than the user’s actual heart rate. This calculation is based on a quadric equation mode that we created. Using this system, we demonstrated at emerging technologies at Siggraph Asia 2016. Approximately 100 people experienced the system and we observed that for all participants, the heart rate was more elevated than in the beginning. Additional experiments endorsed that this effect was possibly caused by the presentation of a false heartbeat by the EH-VR.

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